In today's regulatory environment, companies of all sizes in all industries face ever-increasing compliance requirements. Compliance activities regularly require reporting financial information to commercial banks, insurance issuers, tax authorities, stock exchanges, and other regulatory agencies. Most of this reporting takes place on paper with information manually entered on a form, submitted, and then keyed-in again by the receiving bank, agency and so forth. Regulators and stock exchanges have begun mandating filing in XML-based schemas to reduce manual data entry and errors and facilitate automation. For example, the U.K. tax authority, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, has mandated all companies file in an XML-based schema for finance and business reporting called Extensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) by 2010. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has implemented a voluntary filing program in XBRL and invested in the upgrading of their filing system to support XML data and specifically XBRL.
Few tools today can convert financial information to XBRL. There are also few tools that can automatically convert financial information to other required proprietary XML schemas. Finance and accounting software applications and other client-based tools that can convert financial information to XBRL require users to manually add standard XML tags to financial facts. Users of these tools must basically use extensive mapping routines as inputs to write XML metadata. The present invention addresses these concerns and others.